A blog about tabletop hobby and or strategy games, with a side order of electronic turn based goodness here and there. Now with tons of retro gaming content both electronic and tabletop. Also with 20% more self loathing douchebaggery!

Friday, February 5, 2016

This next installment is heavily based around getting both the Basilisk II and unstable versions of Mini vMac to run Mac II system roms so I can check out color in Macland and get Stuffit 5 to expand stuff.

Oh, and while no photos, beginning the long thinning of the herd on the Mac Plus to have a nice and happy machine.

Well the first thing is that Basilisk II does not cotton to inserting disks. Basically you have to use HFVExplorer, cut and paste from your files into your hard disk image which is sometimes easier than how I set up things in vMac, other times much much more annoying. Especially because Basilisk crashes constantly on me. But after a point I got the bloody thing working. Ish.

Well with the options I had selected I think the machine is running quite fast.

However in vMac trying to be an actual Mac II we have this sort of specs. And as it's wont, it thinks the .dsk isn't a SCSI hard disk but instead a very large floppy disk. Which is slow to my modern eyes. I get a lot of this irritation on the actual Plus while I did tons of game loading and file management. At least emulated I can go into turbo mode.

Double Hard Disks do make for easy transferal of files. However depending on how you have things going one OS will interfere with the other. And vMac oddly enough ignores some OS7 options Basilisk does not. On the same hard disk OS image to boot. They both are very weird with audio.

This gets very annoying because a great many games demand one of the color modes (you get to in MONITOR, not Colors oddly enough!) and you have to keep switching modes. Kind of like some games did in Windows 95 but more frequently but with less trouble and no restarts.

So many .sit archives to bring over to the OS7. Some of which then unpack into .dsk or .img files that you get to put back on your main computer afterwards. WHAT FUN. And many of these archives are mostly blank. Why I am unsure but honestly with so many working programs unless its one I can't play any other way it doesn't much matter to me. I will still end up with plenty of games to play.

See you need to use this here Basilisk GUI to load up all your options. And 2 OS Hard Disks cause it to be cranky so you use one of Basilisk's easier file bits in HFVExplorer to make a small virtual HD image you throw files into, drag em over, then get rid of that image.

See current Mini vMac isn't too thrilled and is unstable with it's Mac II emulation so you have to request a compile of the current more unstable code and they give you a place to look for it in a day or so.

The Mac II 1 bit color isn't really anything better than the Plus.

But a 68020 Mac II is technically much faster than the Plus. But 256 color mode is a tad slower.

Diagnostics say the Mac II is a 3 compared to the Plus at a 1. I really need to see or try SE and Classic/Classic II machine benchmarks to see if I want to bother getting any of those rigs to replace the Plus which I should be able to sell for a small profit or to at least have the same amount of money it would cost to procure those somewhat to much more capable machines. Moderate disk access speed ALONE is a reason for that!

Copying all sorts of stuff over from OS6 drive to 7 took a good 5-10 minutes. Lots and lots of files. Eventually I will be taking my Mac Plus HD image once its pruned down and bringing it over once more (after backing it all up of course!) and then making a smaller HD20.dsk image. I also honestly think the larger drive image is also making the Plus go a bit pokier than it would otherwise be.

And oddly enough some archives turn into auto extractable archives. WHO ARE THEN IMAGE FILES ARG ARG ARG.

But yes, I have spent more and more time playing with file management than actually playing games. My current Plus work is mostly just checking which games work or even properly exist once I unstuff them as opposed to playing them.

Things are getting better and better. Next week I should generally be done with anything other than testing games to see if I want to even play them.